CADET: Your (free!) social video captioning tool

Update, November 8, 2017: CADET 2.0 is here! The new update includes timecode validation, error checking, find and replace, and an adjustable video playback rate. Download the software here.

As social platforms like Facebook and YouTube become dominated by video, providing captions for those videos is increasingly important. Captions allow users to watch and understand a video without sound, whether that is by choice (scrolling through Facebook on the bus or train), or by necessity (serving the approximately 40 million Americans who are deaf or hard of hearing, or non-native English speakers). Captions are also a powerful tool for search, and provide a visual reminder for News Feed scrollers to turn the sound on if they are able. Having this option for social videos makes the content inherently more engaging, and Facebook has even reported a 12% lift in engagement for videos that include captions. In addition to this being just a “best practice,” the FCC has begun to mandate caption files on Internet video clips – on both social and digital platforms.

For so long, our social media producers have used various hacks for getting their videos captioned: YouTube, Rev.com, or Facebook’s own captioning feature. Now, there is a free tool that is open to anyone to caption video: CADET.  WGBH’s National Center for Accessible Media (NCAM) has developed the Caption and Description Editing Tool (CADET), a free downloadable captioning software that will allow users to easily and affordably produce high-quality caption files compatible with any media player and any Web browser. 


CADET creates captions for pre-recorded videos and can run in any web browser. After downloading the software, the user can type the audio into CADET (or import an existing transcript), then edit and time the captions to match the audio. Once the captions are created, the user can upload the video to any public or private website. Since the CADET software runs from the user’s desktop, users do not need to upload personal videos or proprietary content to the internet prior to writing the captions (as is required by services such as YouTube, for example). A one-minute demonstration of CADET being used to caption a NOVA clip is available here.

For more information and to download the software, click here.

Be sure to check out the help documentation that walks you through the basics of captioning with CADET; and get help, report problems and request new features via the CADET user group.

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Article by: Tory Starr

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